I think the problem with btrfs is that it entered the spotlight way to early. With Wayland there was time to work on a lot of the kinks before everyone started seriously switching.
On btrfs a bunch of people switched blindly and then lost data. This caused many to have a bad impression of btrfs. These days it is significantly better but because there was so much fear there is less attention paid to it and it is less widely used.
Both Fedora and openSUSE default to Btrfs. That’s all the praise it needs really.
With Bcachefs still being relatively immature and the situation surrounding (Open)ZFS unchanged, Btrfs is the only CoW-viable option we got. So people will definitely find it, if they need it. Which is where the actual issue is; why would someone for which ext4 has worked splendidly so far, even consider switching? It’s the age-old discussion in which peeps simply like to stick to what already works.
Tbh, if only Debian would default to Btrfs, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
You are welcome to start a movement to get Debian to switch. You will be swimming up stream but you are welcome to try. Debian has been the same for decades and people like that.
You didn’t get my point. Btrfs is one OG distro removed from being THE standard. It’s doing a lot better than you’re making it out to be.
It’s not like Btrfs is dunking on all other file systems and Debian is being unreasonable by defaulting to ext4. Instead, Btrfs wins some of its battles and loses others. It’s pretty competent overall, but ext4 (and other competing file systems) have their respective merits.
Thankfully, we got competing standards that are well-tested. We should celebrate this diversity instead of advocating for monocultures.
It sounds like btrfs is solid most of the time and will explode for like 1 and a thousand cases.
A few years ago left my Fedora machine at home and left for a few days on a trip. When I got back the device was powered off and when I powered it on it said no boot device. When I booted off of a USB the drive showed as unknown with no formating to speak of.
I was able to recover it and the btrfs partition as apparently the GPT table had been overwritten. To this day I have no idea what went wrong. Btrfs in general is very solid in my experience and I use it for USB devices and my Fedora machines. I have never had a issue outside if that one time it died.
Btrfs is the filesystem that is cool but also potentially explosive. I think it has a huge amount of potential and I am very tempted to move my Proxmox machines over since it doesn’t have the same limitations of ZFS
@lancalot @possiblylinux127 I tried it once, it pissed itself and corrupted the entire file system to the point where I couldn’t recover, went back to ext4. Had similar experience with xfs.
@lancalot @possiblylinux127 eh, also Garuda defaults to BTRFS, EOS does not default to BTRFS, but it has an option on their Calamares
I wanted to stick to (what I’d refer to as) OG distros; so independent distros that have kept their relevance over a long period of time.
But you’re correct, Garuda Linux and others default to Btrfs as well. At this point, I’d argue it’s the most sensible option if snapshot functionality is desired from Snapper/Timeshift.
@lancalot none of the “main” distros default to BTRFS, just “derivatives” default to BTRFS, Garuda is based on Arch, so it’s normal that it’s one of the rising new distros, Garuda rose because gaming on Linux received a huge boost from sources like Valve so I doubt that it (Garuda) will deviate from its path with time, plus, they provide multiple flavors for multiple purposes, gaming requires stability & sometimes a rollback mechanism, that’s where BTRFS shine, not so much stability BTW
I’ll keep it brief. But it comes down to the fact that, out of the more popular distros, it’s only officially supported on Ubuntu.
https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting Started/index.html
i’ve found to work without issue on Fedora, Arch and Ubuntu so maybe it’s supported very well
tbh the situation with Wayland was not too different, and wouldn’t have been better. Compared to Wayland, brtfs dodged a bullet. Overhyped, oversold, overcrowdsourced, literally years behind the system it was supposed to “replace” when it was thrown into production. To this day, wayland can’t even complete a full desktop session login on my machine.
So, if you ask me, btrfs should *definitively not * have been Wayland! Can you imagine if btrfs had launched on Fedora, and then you formatted your partition as btrfs to install Linux, but the installer could not install into it? “brtfs reports a writer is not available”, says the installer. You go to the forums to ask what’s going on, why the brtfs does not work. The devs of brtfs respond with “oh it’s just a protocol; everyone who wants to write files into our new partition format have to implement a writer themselves”.
Clearly you have had some bad experiences
Maybe you shouldn’t take your experience from 5 years ago and apply now. Wayland is solid and so is Btrfs. I know that because people use both.
I was mostly curious about btrfs with raid 1 on Proxmox but my doubts have been answered.
Except: I try Wayland every 6 months or so and still have problems with it.
Wayland’s problem isn’t Wayland; it’s all of the stuff that needs to work in Wayland that doesn’t. Using Wayland, to me, feels like using Windows, out a Mac: as long as you don’t stray out of the playground, it’s mostly fine (if a bit slow). As soon as you try to do any outside-the-box setup, like changing the status bar, things start getting all f’ed up. Like, last time I tried, I couldn’t get DPI font scaling to work - fonts would either be too small everywhere, or big in most apps but really tiny in the status bar. Whenever I encounter things like this, I search for solutions for, maybe an hour, see that other people have the same problem and there’s no fix yet, and bail back to X11, which Just Works.
Also, while I know some people have had bad experiences with btrfs, I’ve been using it for years. I originally switched because I had multiple separate cases of data loss using ext4, across different systems. It’s always baffled me that folks complain about btrfs, but ext4 was far less reliably. IME.
I have had the opposite experience from you with wayland and btrfs. Recent data loss with btrfs but perfect functionality with Wayland (on KDE and Arch Linux). Moving panels just works. Fractional scaling just works (though i do miss the old method where smaller screens just got supersampled instead of the way they do it now).
@possiblylinux127 @lambalicious Wayland may be solid as a local display manager but it does not network.
It is a protocol not a display manager. The desktop runs everything and the apps connect to it.
Network was never part of the design and never will be
Maybe you shouldn’t take your experience from 5 years ago and apply now. Wayland is solid and so is Btrfs.
My 2 year old AMD-based laptop begs to differ. X11 is rock-solid, whereas Wayland locks up completely on a regular basis, without producing any useful logging. Every so often I try it to see if things have gotten better, but until today unfortunately not. Personally I prefer X11, I need to perform work on my Linux machine, not spend time debugging a faulty compositor, protocol or wherever the problem lies.
Wayland itself can’t crash, it’s just a set of protocol specs. The implementation you’re using (gnome/KDE/wlroots…) does. Obviously this doesn’t solve your problem as an end-user, just saying that this particular issue isn’t to blame on Wayland in itself.
This sounds like a driver issue or something if all desktops are breaking for you. Have you tried reporting it anywhere?
I think the main difference is that while a graphical session can work through some issurs, a file system is not allowed to fail under any circumstances. The bar is way higher and stability a lot more important.
Wayland didn’t work out networking, even to this day, which is why I’m still using Xorg.
X’s network transparency is overrated IMHO. Since ages most data on desktops is sent via shared memory to the X server (MIT-SHM extension) otherwise the performance would suck. This does not work over the network and so X over the network is actually quite slow. Waypipe works way better for me than SSH X forwarding.
@hummus273 It’s overrated because you don’t use it, I frequently do. If all you want to do is emulate Windows than Wayland is fine. If you need network functionality it is not.
You assume I’m not using it. On the contrary, I use it a lot at work. We have some old TK interfaces. They take ages to load over the network. The interfaces load much faster when using Xvnc running on the remote machine rather than X forwarding (but it is not as convenient).
@hummus273 I have a 1gbit network connection at the co-lo, and 180mb/s cable and I don’t have any lag using X tunneled through ssh.
Not having any lag is physically impossible. You don’t notice it maybe. But if I open Firefox with X forwarding on the same network (1gbe) it is very noticeable for me.
Wayland as a protocol that apps use to talk to the desktop. It doesn’t use network at all really.
You need something like freeRDP for network access.
@possiblylinux127 It is touted as a replacement for X-windows but the PRIMARY ADVANTAGE of X-windows is that you can run a program on one machine and display it on anther making Wayland completely useless in a networked context.
It is not trying to be a one to one replacement. It is a totally different thing. You are wanting a motorcycle to replace your 2002 pickup truck.
Also X forwarding is broken for most stuff. It probably will work but it will run poorly and use lots of bandwidth. This is because there are layers and layers of work arounds to make modern hardware and software work on it. The X protocol was intended for mainframes in the 80’s. It should’ve died long ago.
@possiblylinux127 It strikes me as weird someone down votes a simple statement of fact. I guess they have a problem with reality.
With Wayland there was time to work on a lot of the kinks before everyone started seriously switching.
Not if you were using Ubuntu in 2017 when they switched to Weston as the default display server for 17.10 and lots of people suffered a great deal from how half-baked the project was at the time. For me personally, the 17.10 upgrade failed to start the display server and I ended up reinstalling completely, then in 18.04 they set the default back to XOrg and that upgrade also failed for me, resulting in another reinstall.
I have no doubt that this single decision was responsible for a large amount of the Wayland scepticism that followed.
People pretend Ubuntu is this great thing but in reality it hasn’t been great in 15 years.
@possiblylinux127 @drspod Expect a comment like this from Lemmy, bet you’re running Windows 11, I’ve got servers running Ubuntu 24.04, 22.04, 20.04, Debian Bookworm, Mint, MxLinux, Zorin, Fedora, Alma, Rocky, and Manjaro, the Ubuntu machines consistently give me less headaches even though I do have to purge them of snapd.
Not if you were using Ubuntu in 2017 when they switched to Weston as the default display server for 17.10
Do you have any source on Ubuntu using Weston as its default? As far as I know Ubuntu has always been GNOME, which doesn’t use Weston.
I stated the version number (17.10), the release notes are here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArtfulAardvark/ReleaseNotes
@drspod @possiblylinux127 Since I am using Intel graphics and there is an Xorg X server baked into the Linux kernel for Intel graphics, I switched to it at that time and have been using it ever since.